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ProtecTIER and Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Deduplication

Just recently, Gartner published a report, titled “Magic Quadrant for Deduplication Backup Target Appliances”. This is a completely new analysis, so I’d call it a “Gartner’s first look” on this market.
Strangely enough, the large majority of products were ranked as “niche players”. While this might be an obvious choice for many of the products, I was quite astonished to see IBM’s ProtecTIER solution also ranked as “niche player”.
In the report, Gartner mainly describes three “Cautions” towards ProtecTIER, which are supposed to support their ranking. Let’s have a closer look at those:

Rest assured! IBM continues development on ProtecTIER. Feature integration continues to be reviewed, based on the total customer demand. IBM’s continued support of ProtecTIER has been, is and will be focused on enterprise customer needs. Data Integrity, availability, capacity, flexibility and upgradability are all key attributes that IBM’s customers focus on, and so does ProtecTIER!

2. “There is a need to purchase the deduplication license by the terabyte (TB), separately from the ProtecTIER engine.”

While Gartner sees this as a concern, I believe this is actually an advantage:Most installations I know involve at least two systems, a backup system and a replication target. And whenever customers install more than one single ProtecTIER system in their enterprise, then we can aggregate the software licensing, so that the solution is viewed as a single large system, significantly lowering pricing.

Our pricing model also offers easy (and cost-effective) capacity upgrades when customers’ storage requirements grow over time. No other vendor can provide this capability. With other vendors’ solutions, installing a second box means double cost.
In contrary, additional capacity can be added to the existing license in IBM’s licensing approach.

And there’s another advantage in this model: IBM has also developed a unique pricing alternative for TSM customers, lowering overall costs of the backup solution. (For any customer who may be running TSM, IBM has built a special deduplication filter which maximizes deduplication ratios for TSM backups).

ProtecTIER’s high availability, dual node cluster capability, along with the ability to manage up to a PetaByte (PB) of data behind a single installation has positioned it as an enterprise leader in the market that can grow as the customer requirements grow.While there may be requests for various additional features in the market, ProtecTIER offers significant advantages through the features it already offers. Many of them are inherent in IBM’s unique Gateway design. This has a number of advantages, both technical and financial:

Disk Flexibility: Every other vendor will lock the customer to a specific disk configuration that is approved for their appliance. IBM offers many options both with IBM as well as non-IBM disks. This flexibility ensures the lowest entry price point of a solution.

Future Upgrades: With 30% to 40% CAGR range, customers can expect that their repository will double over the next two to three years. When customers upgrade an appliance, after three years they are forced to buy three year old disk technology (if not older). With IBM, the customer has the flexibility to purchase the best offering (and best technology) when that time comes.

Box swaps: Due to the limitation on disk offerings many customers choose to simply replace their appliance for a new one at the end of three years.
IBM’s Gateway design provides a long term approach: One can upgrade over time, even replacing the Gateway nodes. Therefore, even after a decade you can run your ProtecTIER deduplication on latest technology (without replacing the entire system or copying data from an old to a new box).

Improved TCO: Only IBM provides a TCO approach enabled by the Gateway design:If you look at the long-term data backup strategy in the enterprise, you will not limit your decisions based on a three year “appliance life time” TCO calculation. Instead, you can opt for the best possible performance and ease of management without data migration, rather than being forced into a continuous appliance replacement cycle!

Bottom Line:IBM was build for Enterprise class backup and for the absolute lowest TCO over the long haul. We think that Enterprise class customers are interested in flexibility, maximizing their options and maintaining the absolute lowest cost structure, looking beyond the initial installation period. Customers that are looking for leading edge technology at an attractive price will select IBM’s ProtecTIER.

I’d like to end this article with a quote from Randy Fleenor, IBM’s ProtecTIER sales executive:“What we have been saying all along is that IBM is the leader in Enterprise Class deduplication. (…) If your customer happens to define themselves as enterprise class then welcome to our "niche." If the shoe fits wear it!”